Later on we travelled different paths, with Macintyre joining the Left Tendency of the Communist Party of Australia in the early 1970s and later the Socialist Left of the Victorian ALP, while pursuing his academic career. We both joined the MU Labour Club, the main radical left student club then. We later met at Melbourne University, during the 1960s campus ferment. I first met Stuart in secondary school through a cousin, Michael Feller, who was a classmate at Scotch College. He co-edited with John Faulkner The True Believers: The Story of the Federal Parliamentary Labor Party. His severest words, however, were not for his opponents’ politics but their methods: ‘In submitting history to a loyalty test, they debase it.’”Īmong the other works Macintyre will be remembered for are his co-editing of The Oxford Companion to Australian History, A History for A Nation, The Labor Experiment and A Concise History of Australia. Macintyre's critics, including Greg Melluish, a history lecturer at the University of Wollongong, criticised Macintyre as a partisan history warrior, saying “its primary arguments are derived from the pro-Communist polemics of the Cold War”.īut as Graeme Davison wrote in his obituary for Macintyre in the November 26 Australian, The History Wars “leaves the reader in no doubt of whose side he was on. Perhaps Macintyre’s most widely known work, co-authored with Anna Clark, The History Wars, is a study of the debate about the interpretation of various aspects of how the Australian continent was first settled and colonialism.

He also completed a PhD from the University of Cambridge, for which he was awarded the Blackwood Prize.

He continued to study and received a Master of Arts degree from Monash University. For his Bachelor of Arts, he specialised in history he graduated with Honours in 1968. It recounts the development of the Australian Labor Party's welfare state program in the aftermath of the austerity and suffering of the 1930s Depression and World War II.īorn in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne, Macintyre graduated from the University of Melbourne after finishing his schooling at Scotch College. His most recently published work was the monograph Australia’s Boldest Experiment: war and reconstruction in the 1940s.

The History Wars by Stuart Macintyre